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Uh, unless you're really unlucky (or you buy a Samsung/unbranded one), it should last you a couple of years. Then again, all pieces of hardware are prone to random failures. But generally speaking, the probabilities are very low.

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Place them in a box until a quieter time | Lights down, you up and die.

My Pioneer 102 is indestructible (its going to break now ;p). My friend gave it to me after it conked out on him and he took it apart and cleaned the rails that the head slides on. He recons he "archived" off over 500 DVDs and CDs. Out of all my burners this one has the lowest coaster rate and I worked out the other day that I must have done over 400 DVDs. I used to have it in a external case as I thought it would break, but I installed it directly into my server box as I believe that it will last forever.

So far I had no failed pioneers, I have a 102 and 109. I put a 104 into my sisters computer about 3 years ago and it is still going strong.

My Liteon one failed after about 1/2 year of abuse, as did my sony (can't remember their model numbers). My finance's LG failed after ~30 CD burns *shock*. My new Liteon won't burn my latest batch of media, I believe I need a firmware update, but the software in windows only *curses*.

Oh I remember my ex house mate got a 104 about 4 years ago and he hasn't needed to change it, its survived ~ 4 GPU, 3 processor and 2 mobo upgrades.

My Plextor has worked quite well for about three years now. I'd guess I'm in the same 400-500 disc range as grey_moon. It was pricier than most, but it was also well-supported in Linux. I recently had an incident where the drawer wouldn't close. I opened the device (apparently for the first time since I had to break the sticker), pushed the drawer around a bit until it seemed to be back on track, closed it up and had no problems since.

I don't think I'd ever buy a Lite-On, and the reports I keep seeing about LG's aren't good either. I'm not surprised you've had good experiences with Pioneers, though. They've always seemed to build quality products.

I work in a small manufacturing company that uses a single robotic DVD duplicator for all of our software releases. We've replaced the drive twice with whatever was available on the shelf at Office Max. So far, all three drives lasted upwards to 10,000 burns running nearly non-stop for 6 to 12 hours per day in a relatively dusty warehouse. We CRC every 100th disk and the a per-disk run when we catch an error. If we can find more than 3 coasters in a row, we swap the drive. They never completely fail. Some guys in marketing are still using the old ones.

Between that, the burner I have on my desktop at work, and my own two burners at home; If it works at all, there's nothing to worry about.

I figure, if it works for the first dozen burns, it will last quite a while.

About how long do you guys think a dvd burner would last?This is because I intend on purchasing a new one soon and don't want it to die in the first year or so.

That depends on a lot of factors. It's not like the hardware or anything have a fixed lifespan. As you know the more common aspect is that the more you use it the shorten is it's lifespan. But you can use little and after a few months it stops working. It's not like you open the drive and see it's hardware that you can see if it will last long or not.

My advice is for you to buy whatever you need and don't concern about it since DVD burner drives are cheap today.

Well, a couple of things I've been told help prolong the life of the laser.

1. Use good quality media for burning and reading. Crappy discs are made crappily making the drive work harder to read them, something about the dye used in these discs.
2. Keep it clean
3. If it fails within a year you're covered by warranty, I don't know of any DVD drive manufacturer that has a warranty of less.
4. With the way things are going DVD burners will be like $10 next year. As soon as Bluray/HD DVD burners are mainstream their prices will drop like a rock.

Point 2 is really important if you are a fan freak (I am one ;p), I've seen ppl put too many exhaust fans in and it causes air to suck in from places such as the floppy drive and worse the DVD tray. Can bugger up a burner really quickly. Look for dust building up on around the edge of the burner, or places which you wouldn't normally expect to see dust such as the power button.

DVD Burners are fun... However, it depends on the overall usage of the drive itself. A DVD-R, on average, has a MTBF of 10 000 hours. This is typical for motorized devices such as hard disks. For more information on MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) consult this Wikipedia article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF .

Point 2 is really important if you are a fan freak (I am one ;p), I've seen ppl put too many exhaust fans in and it causes air to suck in from places such as the floppy drive and worse the DVD tray. Can bugger up a burner really quickly. Look for dust building up on around the edge of the burner, or places which you wouldn't normally expect to see dust such as the power button.

That's negative pressure theory, which is what I use. More exhaust than intake. It is quieter (I only use 1 big 120mm fan along at high rpm with the PSU fan and a 120mm side intake blowing directly on the gfx and mobo at low rpm) more hot air is sucked out as hot air rises and more cool air is circulated as air is sucked in through the nooks and crannies of the case as it's not airtight. But yeah you have to get the compressed air out and give it a quick blow every 6 months or so.

That's negative pressure theory, which is what I use. More exhaust than intake. It is quieter (I only use 1 big 120mm fan along at high rpm with the PSU fan and a 120mm side intake blowing directly on the gfx and mobo at low rpm) more hot air is sucked out as hot air rises and more cool air is circulated as air is sucked in through the nooks and crannies of the case as it's not airtight. But yeah you have to get the compressed air out and give it a quick blow every 6 months or so.

I use it in my server box too, but I got air paths to allow the air to be dragged in from the front vent over the hard drives to an exhaust fan. The heat from the GPU is disipated from bottom vents via the PSU and the all important CPU gets cycled straight out of the box via a funnel to another exhaust fan.

The danger I was mentioning is when there is lots of pressure, but no good intakes so it uses any thing it can to drag air through. I guess I should have been a bit more clear in my post

I use it in my server box too, but I got air paths to allow the air to be dragged in from the front vent over the hard drives to an exhaust fan. The heat from the GPU is disipated from bottom vents via the PSU and the all important CPU gets cycled straight out of the box via a funnel to another exhaust fan.

The danger I was mentioning is when there is lots of pressure, but no good intakes so it uses any thing it can to drag air through. I guess I should have been a bit more clear in my post

There's something about front vents and back exhaust that screams vacuum cleaner. PCs are great at sucking up dirt, animal hair, etc... The best ideal environment for a PC, without having to spend a ton of money, is to have a sealed case with a simple (120 mm) case and PSU fan along with the appropriate CPU and GPU heatsinks.

There is a student in my class that I attend that believes that his/her computer can only run with the case side off. You want to keep the case as sealed as much as possible to promote air flow in the case.

I think mine is defective because it doesn't read DVDs that it burned a day or two ago.

That could be an issue. Would you have another DVD reader around to try and read that DVD before settling a diagnosis? Perhaps the DVD itself is defective. DVD-Rs in themselves can be defective causing the burn to go awry or the writer itself going to fast for the media.

There is a student in my class that I attend that believes that his/her computer can only run with the case side off. You want to keep the case as sealed as much as possible to promote air flow in the case.

One of my colleagues used to believe that, and also used to smoke heavily next to his kit with the side off. I could see dust covering all the insides that I guess were glued to the tar *shudder*

He never could give me a decent explanation of how his PC dealt with stagnant air...